Eye of the storm

[Geno]

The adage says that curiosity killed the cat.

It didn't quite kill it yet, in Frieda's case. Curiosity chose to starve her to death inside a Rheinland Valkyrie.

The Flieger drowsily opened her eyes after stretching her arms out, wondering why her sleep felt like it spanned over for less than two hours. The pilot's armchair wasn't exactly crafted with comfort in mind, but to be accommodating enough for a military pilot to be a "stalwart peacekeeper of Rheinland", or so the motto goes. But she had to make due with what she had, surviving like she did in boot camp, only inside the confines of a ridiculously tiny and cramped snubcraft designed by some heartless bastard in Rheinland's R&D hundreds of years ago, who never had the forethought of imagining their soldiers having to literally sleep in his own creations because of emergencies.

What stretched beyond Voigt's small cabin, however, was an uncanny and grotesque stretch of dark, cetacean thundering clouds surrounding her on every direction. Long streaks of current would flash every so often in the unquiet distance, dancing in the dark with no rhyme or reason. But what really instilled a strong dose of powerlessness and alienation in the woman was the presence of several cyclopean monuments belonging to a nature that defies human understanding, standing still and anchored amidst the surrounding storm in an erratic fashion all over the larger monument her ship was anchored to.

Her Valkyrie would be occasionally peppered by stray debris heading her way at a slow velocity, who would simply bounce off her shields, only to be flung back into the storm around them to be shuffled around in an endless cacophony of winds and floating rocks and returning to the epicenter from where it had come from.

The dawning horror of reality had quickly settled in - what she had experienced hours before falling asleep on her Valkyrie was not a fever dream at all, but an uninviting reality, as cold as the cyclical storm she found herself to be trapped in. All she sought out to do was to chase a Cretan transport - but the pilot was a crafty one, and hid its tracks at every step of the way. Her stubbornness led her to a place light-years away from the comfort of her house in New Berlin, far beyond the ken of her understanding. The gravitational pull of the planet seemed to ebb, and out of sheer curiosity, she chose to enter the storm.

The things she was surrounded by were purely indescribable in nature - without a logical sense to speak of. Broken monoliths with many tips and shapes and ellipses and other unnamed geometrical shapes anchored in the eye of a hurricane from an age beyond that of mankind, abandoned and left to rot for all eternity, a testament of the boundless will of the godly beings who created them. Permanently left ajar and distorted, like a crooked church.

After taking her eyes away from the vortex of ennui that stood in front of her, she adjusted her helmet on her face, pushing it roughly from the top to secure it past the ridiculous vastness of her hair. After slowly gaining her bearings, she remembered that she was not alone - in fact, that nightmarish trap did not ensnare just her ship, but also another Valkyrie identical to her own, occupied by none other than Traudel herself.

The Flieger rubbed her eyes, patching herself through her superior's frequency after some button mashing on her console which was etched into muscle memory after following the step-by-step manual several times.

"Hallo. Habermeyer, can you hear me?"
"Habermeyer? I can hear your engines rumble from here. Answer me, bitte..."

After failing to contact her superior multiple times, she removed her helmet, and shoved it to the end of the cabin, up against the glass of the cockpit with a thunk. The flight suit she had used to cover the lousy leather "chair" part of the seat with didn't help with how painfully uncomfortable it was, making the woman hold onto her back in annoyance and frustration as she rummaged around the ship for some sustenance to jolt her brain up, just to give her the necessary push to focus on finding a way out of that nightmare, hoping that the previous owner of that Valkyrie restocked it with at least some supplies - bread, crumbs, anything.

After scrounging in every nook and cranny at the bottom end of the ship next to the cargo bay, she produced a single MRE package - enveloped in a plastic bag, small, and ready to eat in only three minutes. The lettering on the side hinted at the contents of the package being purely beef stew, well within the expiration date. Military rations are meant to stay, and she was absolutely starved after chasing a single Correo ship across the span of seven different systems, collapsing out of sheer exhaustion inside a planet with a strong gravitational pull that just wouldn't let go.

After returning to the cabin's seat with a metal spork in one hand and a fuming Rindereintopf in the other, the soldier lady backed her seat a little to allow her legs to comfortably stand on the console, occasionally pinging the nearby Valkyrie out of her visual range every minute or so. The storm wouldn't ebb, and the wrecked, shining gate with six angles on the other end of the storm seemed like the blatant solution - so obvious and so very clear.

There was only one problem with the gate. The safety, and the nature of it. How could the Oberleutnant have been in one of those, before? And what could she have possibly meant with "Endless peace waiting on the other side"? There were just too many questions, and very little answers that could possibly explain it.

During her days in Bootcamp, she was barely taught anything about the Nomad wars that happened exactly thirty years ago. An unknown type of "parasite" controlled the people of Rheinland into committing war crimes and invasions against the other houses in space. While nothing as atrocious and horrendous as the Glassing of Leeds, the Nomad incursion was brief and very costly, setting Rheinland's economy backwards for a while. The cleanup was intensive, and the lives lost were absolutely numerous. But these alien things - what were they, exactly? How could they take control of others like it's some kind of sport to them?

As intimidating as it was to fret about, nothing could help a hearty helping of warm stew down her throat to quench her doubts. If they can bleed, she can kill them. They're just wild animals, nothing more. Nothing as terrifying as a squadron of onyx-black Odins piloted by the top aces of the Rote Hessen volksrevolution. The depravity of the human nature is just so much more terrifying than the ones who built these ruins she was latching onto for dear life with her ship.

After sending another transmission ping to Traudel, she noticed a bizarre shift in the gravity of her cabin, noticing how the now empty pack of beef stew was beginning to slowly levitate from the console buttons.

"Habermeyer. I think it's time. Please pick up."